Earthship Premiere Lyric Video for “Valley of Thorns”
Posted in Bootleg Theater on May 4th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
To call Berlin’s Earthship (also stylized as Earth Ship) a sludge rock band is really only telling half the story. Maybe even less than half. I haven’t had the pleasure yet as regards their impending fourth full-length, Hollowed — out June 24 via Napalm Records — but to listen to “Valley of Thorns,” there’s sludge, yeah, but also metallic underpinnings that come through in the guitar periodically, a hint of Slayer here, some black metal, something more extreme in the middle, more progressive in the ending. Couple that with a shift into melodies brazenly born out of the self-titled-era Alice in Chains playbook, which is ground few dare to tread, and Earthship emerge four minutes later with a sound that seems less indebted to genre than built outward from it.
If sonic individuality isn’t enough to intrigue on principle, there’s also songwriting at work, and a sense of scope to “Valley of Thorns” as it moves between these elements, almost struggling against itself as it works out verses and choruses en route to a bleaker, chugging midsection. Growls back cleaner singing as they unleash the true hook in the nodding second half, and they finish with a torrent of a guitar solo before cutting “Valley of Thorns” short presumably to make way for what follows in the tracklisting (if you’re curious, it’s “Conjured”). How representative “Valley of Thorns” might be of Hollowed as a whole, again, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find Earthship changing up their approach, considering their past releases and the fact that a band so intentionally stylistically broad is rarely content to stand still.
You can find the premiere of a new lyric video for “Valley of Thorns” below, followed by some comment from the band on the track.
Please enjoy:
Earthship, “Valley of Thorns” lyric video
Earthship on “Valley of Thorns”
“VALLEY OF THORNS is one of our faster, a bit more progressive and cheerful tracks of the album but quite the opposite are the lyrics, mainly dealing with emptiness and despair. A sad and lonesome trip into oblivion but in a very colorful and metaphorical way. It shows you up somehow that we’re all running our private race against time before it’s all over and gone. Life is short, let’s get some shots!”
